I like chocolate ..... don't I?

[garote]

This article puts my chocolate cravings in an interesting light. Perhaps I'm one of those individuals with the low-dopamine-receptor gene variant, and that's what compels me to eat so much chocolate in one sitting.

Some people seem content with a few squares, but I will rapidly munch through an entire bar and be ready for more in due time.

I know it's very speculative, but ... could this also be the basis for my family's supposed "predisposition" to drug abuse? One gene, manipulating my response to everything from chocolate to alcohol?

Well, it's probably a collection of genes at least, but still...

Comments

[macramedildo.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. I crave chocolate pretty bad at times (currently eating a brownie and washing it down with hot cocoa) but I'd rather someone shoot me between the eyes than force me to eat Hershey's. I go through a pretty good amount of high-cocoa-content dark chocolate. I've spent $80 on chocolate in a single setting commonly before... but I've never eaten more than half a bar in a day. I know I have the "genes" for addiction, but I've never been addicted to any substance. Regardless if you go the "nature" or "nurture" argument, I should be packing away Mr. Goodbars like they're going out of style, right? But I'm not. So, I don't know if you can blame genes completely for this stuff...

[garote]

I'd never blame genes completely. That's why I use the word "predisposition"...
Chocolate is actually the hardest drug I have ever ingested, throughout my entire life. Sometimes I think that explains two things:
1. Why I like chocolate so much
2. Why I was able to eventually deal with my emotional problems (mid-grade depression, violent temper, undiagnosed ADD)
Other times I think it explains nothing, and instead, I just became more able to manage myself as I grew older and less hormonal.

But either way, I'm sure that if I'd turned to substances - legal or otherwise - as a tool to "regulate" how I felt about things (like my sister did), that would have made my journey towards stability a much, MUCH longer one. If you feel like shit and you go out and get a substance - food, pharmaceutical, etc - so you can ingest it and make that shit feeling go away (and I'm not talking about diabetics here, just feeling emotionally shitty), then that's a problem. Addiction is a slippery word - most of the time it conjures up images that are too extreme - but if it's not addiction in the clinical sense, it's at least a dependence.

I wish I could say with complete conviction that the things I did were actually the things that helped, but there's always a part of me that will stiff-arm the evidence and just say, "Since I'm OK now, I obviously must not have been in real danger then." It's been a long time since I was as depressed, or as violent, as I was in the 90's.

But anyway, yeah. Hershey's is crap. After a couple months on nothing but the non-dairy dark, anything made by Hershey's tastes more like used teabags than like chocolate. >:)

[breakpoint.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's actually the only good thing I can say about SSRIs-- at least they're not addictive. Because, personally, the only thing I think they're therapeutically appropriate for is helping somebody see that they are not going crazy, they just learn when they can trust their fight-or-flight response, and when they need to ignore it.

You can't trust your head all the time, after all.

Fortunately, I think the only thing I tend to have an addictive personality towards is sex, and I'm pretty damned blunt about that.

[mommadona.livejournal.com]

wait. you seriously have never drank coffee or alcohol of any type? or you consider chocolate a harder drug than coffee and alcohol?

[garote]

Coffee... Wow, you're right, I completely forgot about coffee. I used to drink half a cup of black coffee every day in my Junior year of High School